22 REALTOR® JULY/AUGUST 2015 REALTORMAG.REALTOR.ORG
Whenever there’s an open
house for a listing on her
street, Rosalind Creasy expects a knock on her door.

Not only does the landscaping—bursting with squash blossoms, golden-stemmed chard, and
ruby-red strawberries—bring curious
kids and hungry honeybees to her yard, it
also brings real estate agents.

Many want to know if she’s interested in putting her Los Altos,Calif., home up for sale, but they’re also drawn to the beauty andfragrance provided by the kumquat trees and sugar snap peas,just like anyone else. “I could sell my house in a minute,” she says.“Right now it’s because it’s got an apple tree in bloom, but really,there’s always something beautiful happening.”However, Creasy’s edible landscaping hasn’t always been ad-mired by the local real estate community. The landscape archi-tect and author remembers a “traumatic experience” decadesago, after replacing a couple’s lawn with raised garden beds andhelping them cultivate kiwi and pomegranate plants there. Threeyears later, the couple divorced and put the house on the market.

Creasy happened to stop by the listing and saw the landscapinghad been all stripped out, lawn back in place. “I looked up in hor-ror,” she remembers. “The real es-tate agent told me houses withlawns ‘sell faster.’ I couldhave killed her!”Understandingthis focus on back-yard agriculture asan emerging realestate niche mayexpand your reachwith buyers andsellers. As a nationalspeaker and ediblelandscaping expert,Creasy has seen a seachange in how the publicviews growing food and tendingto food-producing fauna in their yards.

She says that, just as a segment of society has traded in the al-lure of the huge, gas-guzzling Cadillac forsleeker, more efficient cars, so too havewe redefined the concept of a desirableoutdoor space. “It used to be that havinga big lawn and lots of shrubs was a statussymbol, showing you have so much land andso many servants and so much money you didn’thave to use your land to just grow food,” Creasy says.“But now edibles have cachet. They are in. They’re sus-tainable. They’re healthy. Wealthy, educated people in par-ticular are aware that this is the new status symbol.”A Buzz in the Air

It’s not just gardens that are creating buzz. There’s nodoubt in the mind of American Beekeeping FederationPresident Tim Tucker that the backyard beehive trend isgoing mainstream. “The number of beekeepers of one to fivehives is growing by leaps and bounds,” he says. Part of this isfueled by the shock over the problem of colony collapse disorder,a mysterious event where entire colonies of bees perish. “Peo-ple do want to help,” he says. However, Tucker says he also seesa growing interest from older home owners, some of whom arehaving trouble finding wild bees for fruit trees and other plantsthat rely on pollination. “There’s also this movement of the babyboom generation toward more sustainable practices. They see itas a hobby that will help their garden.”Chicago home owner Jean Bryan says she’s excitedabout the uptick in people interested in agriculturein her Rogers Park neighborhood. “This neigh-borhood is very chicken-heavy,” she says with asmile. “There’s a real tipping point in terms of ourawareness of healthy food and the need for hav-ing food closer at hand.”With the increasing interest in local food pro-duction, Bryan knows her yard—at 50 by 170 feet,it’s larger than the average Chicago lot—is enviablefor city dwellers. She has room for a coop that offersprotection and a “chicken run” that allows her sevenhens outdoor space to scratch and forage. “There’s anincreasing interest in home production of food—chickensare a subset of that—and the size of our yard would be very at-tractive to someone who was into that.”The yard also offers a head start for gardeners that’s been de-